Rudy Demotte, Minister-President of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, is due to go to New York for the UN Commission on the Status of Women in New York, 10-14 March. Demotte’s message is clear: a woman’s right to abortion needs to be hammered home. The trip is with a view to taking the Brussels Declaration, which is calling for legalising abortion, his department reported. The Declaration gathered more than 2,500 signatures last year (www.droitavortement.com), and champions treating … Continued

The Belgian parliament has passed a law to allow recording of the death of a fetus from 140 days (20 weeks) of pregnancy, i.e. earlier than at the previous 180 days (26 weeks) of pregnancy. It comes at the end of a long process over several legislative sessions of various initiatives to recognise a miscarried fetus as well as a stillbirth. The law makes it mandatory to record the death in the communal register of … Continued

Commentary by Carine Vrancken, LUNA Abortion Centre, Hasselt, Belgium Since mid-2016, several Belgian opposition political parties have submitted bills to change the abortion law. Some of them have been uncomplicated (take the existing text out of the penal code and put it in a civil law, without changing the content) while others have proposed a substantial change (take abortion out of the penal code, allow abortion on request up to the 20th week of pregnancy … Continued

The debates on taking abortion out of the Penal Code in Belgium are over, at least in the Justice Commission of the Chamber of Representatives. The hearings almost all went in the same direction: that abortion must be removed from the Penal Code. In early July, the Justice Commission will look at the issue once more and then a vote should be taken. For Karine Lalieux, the Socialist MP behind the decriminalisation bill, it would … Continued

On 20 July 2016 we reported that a member of the Ecolo (Green) Party in Belgium had tabled a bill to remove abortion from the Penal Code so that it was no longer regarded as a criminal offence, and that this was not the first attempt to do so. On 21 March 2017, we reported that there had been a rush of media stories announcing a campaign in Belgium that was variously calling for modernisation … Continued